SAN FRANCISCO -- With home-run king Barry Bonds leaving the heavy hitting to his lawyers, a federal appeals court Wednesday tussled with arguments over whether the former San Francisco Giants slugger's long legal saga needs to go to extra innings.

In a fast-paced 35 minutes of legal sparring, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals weighed Bonds' bid to set aside his 2010 conviction for obstructing justice in his testimony to a federal grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroids scandal.

Bonds, who did not attend the hearing, argues that he was convicted of giving a rambling, evasive answer that had no bearing on the December 2003 grand jury investigation.

The three 9th Circuit judges who heard the case Wednesday did not send strong signals on whether Bonds may get a new trial on the charge, although they appeared receptive to some of his lawyer's key arguments. Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona, in particular pressed the government on whether Bonds could be convicted of obstructing justice based on meandering testimony when he later followed up with direct answers on the same subject.

"How can that obstruct justice?" Hawkins asked assistant U.S. attorney Merry Jean Chan at one point, as she defended the jury's verdict.

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Chan told the judges that, in fact, Bonds had a "corrupt intent" to mislead the grand jury investigating the most sweeping doping scandal in sports history. The prosecutor stressed that any Bonds testimony that ducked questions about his steroid use and BALCO exposed him to the obstruction conviction.

Lawyers on both sides of the case declined to speculate outside court on how the 9th Circuit would rule.

A jury in April 2010 convicted Bonds on the obstruction charge for testimony he provided to the BALCO grand jury, in which he denied using performance-enhancing drugs as he chased baseball's home run records. The same jury deadlocked on three perjury charges, which were later dropped by federal prosecutors.

The jury specifically convicted Bonds for a rambling answer to a question about whether his former personal trainer, Greg Anderson, had ever supplied or injected him with steroids. The answer included musings about being "a celebrity child with a famous father" and other remarks that jurors later said were meant to evade questions about his steroid use and relationship with Anderson.

Dennis Riordan, Bonds' appellate lawyer, urged the 9th Circuit to set aside the conviction, saying the grand jury statement was not even charged as a specific crime in the government's indictment and was too vague to amount to obstruction.

"We have a conviction here that literally ... would allow government to charge (that) you committed a crime in some way," he told the judges.

But the judges also pressed Riordan, suggesting the indictment captured any statement Bonds made that was designed to mislead the grand jury. Judge Mary Schroeder noted that the jury found the statement to be obstruction, and that Susan Illston, the trial judge, rejected Bonds' identical argument after considering the evidence.

Bonds, who finished up his playing career in 2007, is trying to set aside his felony conviction and sentence of two years' probation and a month of electronic monitoring at home as he also hopes to gain entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Hall voters did not elect him last month in his first year of eligibility.

Howard Mintz covers legal affairs. Contact him at 408-286-0236 or follow him at Twitter.com/hmintz.